1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to transfer and/or duplication of communication sessions, for example communication sessions involving wireless personal portable user terminals.
2. Description of Related Art
People use portable devices to listen to broadcast programming (for example, radio or television programming), to make phone calls and to receive rights-protected programming such as on-demand programming (e.g. subscription content or pay-per view content). From time to time, a user starting a session with one device may want to continue the session with another device. For example, a user may listen to a broadcasted concert using a portable radio, and then may want to hear the end of the concert on his or her home stereo system. In another example, a user may start a phone call using his or her personal cellular phone and then may want to transfer the call to another person at his or her vicinity.
Presently, such session handover is made manually: in the first example, one will need to manually tune his home stereo to the same radio station set on his portable radio, while in the second example, one will hand over his personal telephone handset to the other person. Such manual procedures are inconvenient. In other cases, for example when communicating with an on-demand service, a communication session involves a security handshake, such as negotiation and exchange of session keys, in order to protect the privacy of the participants or the digital rights of a content provider that electronically packages the content for being used only on a specific device. Resuming such a session on another device, may be unfeasible because the transferee device may lack the require keys or identity which indicates rights to receive particular content provided by the service.
The term “session handover” or “session transfer” used throughout this document relates to the transfer of a communication session between user terminals. It must not be confused with a similar term used in the context of cellular telephony, relating to the transfer of a session between cellular base stations and a single user terminal.
Thus, there is an ongoing need, and it would be highly desirable to have, improved techniques for handover of sessions between a plurality of client devices.